What are we doing?

Introduction

Music has been around since the history of mankind. However, where most of today’s music tends to be used for personal entertainment, it was often used to give praise to deities. But are there any musicological properties of a piece of music that make it specifically suitable for religious purpouses? Bach himself sometimes re-used his ‘pagan’ music for religious purposes and vice versa giving an important role to lyrics. However, we also know that Bach was a master in the writing of baroque affective music, indicating a carefull use of pitch, volume, tibre, and time for bringing music to it’s purposes. So, even if there is some overlap between musical sound of pagan en religious music, there might be some aspects which fit just better for one of them.

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Data, data, data.

Title	ID	Songs
Religious	1Lfv5hpiBqtxHIlaeUo8TS	44
Top Christian Contemporary	37i9dQZF1DWUileP28ODwg	58
Top Christian	37i9dQZF1DXcb6CQIjdqKy	66
Christian Playlist for 2017	5t4HnPlX51s5ZdC2Lucnyz	391
Islamic / Nasheeds	1dNteyophghoFsbO3lCULn	67
Islamic Song	3SxT23r9nc6M1Ew2xrVpaV	108
Islamic Songs	1YVnT9OowJP6ayM5QRazW7	120
Sanskrit / Hindu Mantra Chants	6RLNAQJoR5OUAl5lyA8YJJ	133
Fusion Hinduism	5lNmoVhBqIY0zKcZH3RZlr	53
Buddhist Meditation Songs	3c4AduB9UOrxkfdW0Nh2hA	270
BUDISTA	1aBpY65gFEM88trlD8Beht	238
Top Jewish Music	05Um5tgwbBWNAikYlwCId6	255
Jewish Music - Driving	1m0HB9PIDiovCDtO4qc00l	402

Title	ID	Songs
Non Religious	4VuiQ0wD6Xh5uDYveV2b0C	183
Non Religious 3	0B6Lj8siocfyTOCzyeBYzX	59
Top 2017	1DoUPHRIAC6YbEPiDf8IOd	99
Today's Top Hits	37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M	50
TOP 2019	208tdAvqyrtssZFKLktwkx	43
Top Tracks of 2018	37i9dQZF1DX1HUbZS4LEyL	100
Top of the Charts	7b2rMhQyuX3vkgQz2umhdV	107
Top allertijden	1nwCwjYUStN0xvoSmSgS9M	785
2019 Hits	4JkkvMpVl4lSioqQjeAL0q	128

These tables should eventually be merged.

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What’s inside?

Using the most interesting whole-song features from the Spotify API, duration_ms and speechiness are on a re-normalized log scale.

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These visualisations show the spread of each musical variable. De cirle with cross shows where the mean lies. There are already some interesting findings visible like the difference in danceability of religious and non religious music. On average religious music is less danceable but more acoustic compared to non-religious music. Speechiness and duration are quite the same with exceptions to many outliers. On most properties Religious music has a very wide spread. Tempo is the same on average, however there is more spread in religious music.

Religions Differ

All songs from the corpus on the AV-plane, size is popularity, hovelabels should be extended

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On the arousal-valence plane religious and non-religious music have kind of the same spread, however there is a big difference for individual religions. Buddhistic music tends to be quite sleepy while most Jewish music tends to be very happy. Christian and Islamic music have a wider spread like non-religious music, where the former is in the more angry corner of the plane. The different musical modes do not have much influence on the emotional placement. These results point to a research direction which focuses more on different aspects of music of different religions. For now it seems that there is indeed a difference between religious and non-religious music. However it might also be that the differences are just the result of comparing western music with non-western music. To test that hypothesis Christian and Islamic songs have to be compared more thoroughly with the non-religious data set.

Outliers

Left is pitch, right is timbre

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Let’s inspect some outliers of different religions.

• The buddhistic song has a very high valence combined with a very low energy. This piece does not seem to have a primary key, however there is some kind of pattern visible. There is also a small checkerboard visible on the pitch side indicating fast changes of pitch.
• The Jewish and None-religious songs have a very high valence and a very high energy They both have much of the c2 feature in the timbre. Also there seems to be a switch in pitch in both songs at two-third of the song.

Inliers

This page should eventually contain an evaluation of typical songs of a religion.

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So What?

Conclusion

TODO There seems to be a lot of musical difference between different religions while for every religion there is some non-religious music available with kind of the same properties.

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